Welcome to the Anthropocene

by Peter Jekel

Ring around the Rosey Old English Verse

It feels surreal. It feels like one is living in the plot of a science fiction story. How quickly the world can change around us. Within the period of a few months, we went from celebrating the Holiday Season in December 2019 to January 2020 with our families and friends, only to be locked down in relative isolation, save for the wonders of modern technology. Now here we are in the spring of 2020, many of us working from home and many others not working at all. Then there are the hospitals which in some areas of the globe are filled to capacity and beyond. In some countries, difficult decisions are being made by doctors as to who should receive a ventilator to keep them alive. Such is the current state of the world caused by the novel coronavirus, a virus belonging to the same family of viruses that cause diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Disease (SARS), Middle Eastern Respiratory Disease (MERS) and the more common rhinoviruses that cause one of the banes of humankind, the common cold. This novel coronavirus has been dubbed COVID-19, an acronym for Coronavirus Disease-2019. COVID-19 may be a novel virus, but it hardly the first to impact the human population and likely will not be the last.

It is deforestation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, farming intensification, overpopulation, increased urbanization, all symptoms of the age of humankind, the Anthropocene, that has contributed to the current pandemic’s creation, impact and rapid spread around the world. and continued abuse of our planet will result in many more pandemics. All of these activities have a significant impact on the environment by opening up new territory which may be home to novel microbes, by changing ranges of microbes, altering ecosystems, and thus changing everything including the denizens of the microbial world and concentrating people in smaller areas. The world, whether we like it or not, is highly interconnected and the more that we disturb those connections, the more likely that pandemics will continue into our future.

How does a pandemic develop? Normally it begins as a disease found in animals that causes no ill effects to people. As time passes on, due to the closeness of people to the animal host, the organism now known as a zoonoses, whether bacteria, protozoans, fungi or viruses, may evolve and eventually make a leap to humans but it is limited in its impact on the population, causing an infection in a few before vanishing again. However it likely has not vanished entirely. The organism will begin to proliferate in a local population and further mutates to become a more efficient pathogen in people, eventually reaching a stage where the organism passes from person to person. From there, since it is a novel organism, the population at large has no immunity to the organism and it begins to spread afield. When it reaches large areas of the globe, it evolves from an epidemic to a pandemic.

Another interesting theory that has been put forward is that pandemics come to Earth from outer space. Both the late British astronomer, Sir Frederick Hoyle and Sri Lankan astrophysicist, Chandra Wickramasinghe came up with the theory that pandemics have their origin in outer space. They hypothesized that the 1918 flu pandemic came from cometary dust seeding the Earth with the virus. Wickramasinghe has now claimed that the current novel coronavirus also had its origin in outer space. In October of last year, a comet exploded over northeast China. Viral particles, he theorizes survived entry onto Earth in the area of Wuhan, China. There are more critics than followers of this hypothesis of the origin of pandemics. At least one author has exploited this theory to create a masterpiece science fiction thriller. Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, and its posthumously published sequel, The Andromeda Evolution, describes a group of scientists trying to contend not with anything they have seen before, a microbe from space, the continuously mutating alien La Linea Verde de Muerte organism.

Whatever their origin, diseases have plagued humankind since the time when we survived as hunter-gatherers. However, it was when humankind settled into permanent settlements that the threat of disease moved from sporadic cases possibly annihilating a small group of human beings. As settlements expanded and interactions between different groups increased, often through trade or war, the scope of any disease could reach epidemic proportions and from there, reach pandemic levels.

Throughout history, there have been a number of pandemics and of those several had a profound impact on human cultural evolution. In 430 BC, there was an outbreak of an unknown disease that unfortunately happened during another scourge of humankind, war. The Peloponnesian War was a war between two Greek city states, the militaristic Sparta and the more cultured Athens. As Spartans arrived at the city walls of their adversary, a disease that had ravaged northern Africa had arrived in Athens, killing approximately two-thirds of its approximately 250,000 inhabitants; the Spartans were assured of their conquest of the city. The Golden Age of Greece was now over.

It is suspected by modern historians that the disease that defeated Athens was typhus, a bacterial disease that comes in several forms spread by either fleas, chiggers or body lice. The one that devastated Athens was likely epidemic typhus carried by body lice. Typhus also had a role in other historical milestones. As the French Army of Napoleon left Russia in 1812, defeated, more soldiers died of typhus than were killed during the Russian campaign. It was also responsible for hundreds of deaths during the First and Second World Wars.

Typhus, a zoonotic disease caused by a bacteria, is normally found in wild rodents and only when their flora of parasitic arthropods cross the species barrier to feed on humans, does the disease impact human populations. The disease is relatively rare today but it has not disappeared. Today, this disease, that causes fever, headache and skin rashes in its victims still kills around two thousand people annually mainly in impoverished tropical countries, Typhus has been largely eliminated in western society due to improved sanitation that limits rodent populations.

The mighty Roman Empire was also not immune to a pandemic. In 165 to 180 AD, there was an outbreak of what likely was smallpox, that was brought back to the Empire by its troops that were campaigning in the Near East. At its peak, the disease was claiming up to two thousand Roman lives per day. When the pandemic finally ended, it had claimed the lives of around five million people.

It was not over for Rome either. Another pandemic hit them from 249 to 262 AD, the Plague of Cyprian, named for its first known victim, St. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. The disease in question is a matter of debate, but many historians suggest that it was again smallpox; it causes fever and a severe skin rash in its victims and has a death rate of around thirty percent. Unfortunately for Rome, this time the outbreak was but one of several forces, the others being peasant rebellions, political instability, economic depression, impacting Rome, which has become collectively known as the Crisis of the Third Century (235 to 284 AD) which almost led to the Empire’s collapse. Though the Empire did not collapse, after the Crisis, society was never the same, beginning its transition from the military leader of the known world to slowly dissolving into the Dark Ages that would engulf Europe for centuries.

Smallpox is a viral disease that actually led to the development of vaccines. British physician, Edward Jenner (1749-1823), noticed that milkmaids were not impacted by the horrific disease but instead developed a milder version of the disease. Jenner hypothesized that there must be some mechanism at work to explain this. The milkmaids’ apparent resistance appeared to be related to their exposure to the milder version of the illness known as cowpox that afflicted the cattle that the women milked. 1796 was the year that he could test his idea. A woman who had a case of cowpox came to him for treatment. He took some material of the lesions on the milkmaid’s hand and injected it into the young son of his gardener, James Phipps. James expectedly suffered only mild symptoms of cowpox, much like the milkmaids, but the experiment was not complete. After two months Jenner injected the boy with material taken from a smallpox lesion. The result was no smallpox; the boy was immune. This method of testing new vaccines would not stand up to any ethical scrutiny today, but it did work and a true curse of humankind was beginning its progression toward becoming the one human disease to be totally eradicated. Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1977 through an intense vaccination program.

It is not out of the question perhaps that a virus such as smallpox made the leap to humans through our close proximity to domesticated animals with the advent of farming, not as an antidote to the disease as cowpox turned out to be, but as a new virus that eventually evolved to become one of the greatest scourges in human history.

When Rome split into the western Catholic-dominated and eastern Byzantine empires, it did not escape the menace of a pandemic. In 541 to 542 AD the Byzantine Empire was hit by the Plague of Justinian; Justinian I was the Byzantine emperor at the time. Ten thousand people died daily in the capital of Constantinople; bodies became so commonplace that they were not buried due to lack of space but stacked in the open. Historians believe that the disease killed approximately a quarter of the human population at the time in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Plague of Justinian was the first recorded plague pandemic in human history, but it certainly would not be the last and there were many sporadic cases throughout history since Justinian, but none gripped the world as much as the Black Death of Europe in the 14^th century peaking between 1347 and 1351. How the disease arrived in Europe is unknown but it is believed that it started with the arrival of soldiers and merchants from Asia. Its spectre was not isolated to Europe where approximately a third of the known population, around 35 million at the time, were killed during its tenure. It devastated the populations in its birthplace in Asia and also impacted North Africa. In total, the disease left a legacy of death resulting in estimates of between 75 to 200 million dead.

There were sporadic cases in Europe of the plague until the 18^th century. The City of London suffered a Great Plague between 1665 to 1666, where the disease killed around one hundred thousand citizens of London, which made up twenty percent of the city’s population. As recently as 1855 a plague epidemic hit China’s Yunnan Province and spread from there through trade to other parts of China, to India, Africa and the Americas. It officially ended in 1959.

Plague today still claims around six hundred lives per year, most occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Peru. The disease itself is caused by a bacteria, Yersinia pestis, that normally circulates among rodents, spreading through them by the bite of an infected flea, and will occasionally spill over into the human population. Why it has become relatively rare in the world after having decimated the population of Middle Ages Europe is unknown. Improved sanitation that reduces rodent populations may be one part of the equation but there are also theories that speculate that there may be some element of immunity to this curse of humankind after years of exposure.

Many stories have been written about the plague. Some of the best are the books by authors who were actually living when the plague was threatening. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron is about the plague of the Middle Ages beginning in the hard-hit city of Florence. It follows the lives of seven women and three men as they seek to escape the ravished horror that is the city, entertaining each other by telling stories. Daniel Defoe, author of the famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, wrote another fictional tale, A Journal of the Plague Year, about the plague that swept through London in 1665. It is incredibly detailed in its descriptions of the protagonist’s journey from house to house in London, chronicling the horrific visions that he sees.

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his alternate history, The Years of Rice and Salt, speculates a Europe that was decimated not by a third of the population dying during the Black Plague years, but 99 percent. It details the evolution of a Europe with very different influences affecting its development.

Other authors wrote of fictional plagues which appear to take their inspiration from the Black Death of Europe. The Bazi Plague found in The Gor series by John Norman, is a disease that spreads rapidly with symptoms similar to that of the plague, pustules over the body and a yellowing of the whites of the eyes. J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings describes a plague as well. The disease that sweeps through all the kingdoms of Middle Earth reaches a ninety percent fatality rate far deadlier than that which had gripped medieval Europe.

When it comes to pandemics in the modern age, he most common is influenza. It is caused by the influenza virus and symptoms range from mild to severe respiratory symptoms lasting an average of two weeks. The seasonal variety that happens every year can be fatal to vulnerable populations and kills up to 650,000 people per average year worldwide. It is spread through droplet spray from coughs and sneezes of infected people though contact with infected surfaces has been documented. Unfortunately, one can begin to be infectious prior to becoming actively ill which is why influenza can spread quickly in a population.

Viruses are basically packages of genetic material (DNA or RNA) that is enveloped in a protein shell called a capsid. Viruses may also have a fatty (lipid) envelope which it derives from the host cell membrane. Whether viruses are alive in a true sense is a matter of some debate among biologists. They do not eat, sleep, move or do anything that normally defines living organisms other than the fact that they reproduce but even that, they cannot do on their own. They rely on the inner machinery of a host cell to do that. There are viruses that can infect every known type of living organism ranging from bacteria all the way up to human beings.

In the case of influenza of which there are four subtypes known as influenza A, B, C and D, the virus is made up of RNA which is surrounded by a protein coat made up of hemagglutin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). Influenza A is the one most commonly associated with seasonal and pandemic influenzas. There are also varieties that can infect birds, swine, dogs, humans, seals and horses.

It is its protein coat that gives the strain of virus its name such as H1N1, for example. Influenza viruses are highly mutagenic; that is they change rapidly from one season to another. They evolve constantly by mutation or reassortment. Every year there is a different dominant strain of influenza virus-it is identified through a number of models based on influenza testing across the globe allowing scientists to speculate on the best combination to provide the best possible protection in the form of a vaccine. The small changes in the H or N antigens on the surface of the viral envelope from one season is the reason why new vaccines are required to provide immunity annually. This gradual change is known as antigenic drift.

Sometimes there is a rapid change that is caused by a radical reassortment of the H and N proteins. This may happen when the virus reassorts not just with other human strains of the virus but with ones usually of avian or swine origin, known as antigenic shift. The result is a novel virus that people will have little to no immunity to, thus resulting in a pandemic.

March 1918, during the last few months of the First World War, should have been a time of celebration but a deadly influenza strain spoiled that. It was first identified at a United States military camp in Kansas. Within six months it had hit all continents aided by the mechanisms of modern transportation. It abated a little in the summer but in the fall of 1918 it struck back with a vengeance. By the time that the pandemic was over in 1920, a billion people across the globe had contracted it and between twenty to one hundred million people had died. Whereas, normally seasonal influenza targets the very young and old as its victims, the flu of 1918 seemed to target young healthy people. Ironically it was dubbed Spanish Flu but Spain was not the source of the disease. It got the name from the fact that Spain, not a participant in the First World War, did not censor its news as other nations did due to the war, so that there was a great deal of information about the pandemic coming from there.

It was the secrecy in the rest of the world though that contributed to many of the deaths. Simple practises such as physical distancing, avoiding crowds, closing of schools and businesses, banning large events, all were instituted across the globe, but it was often too little too late. If they had been implemented earlier, lives would have been saved. One great comparison of how these simple measures could make a big difference in the outcome of a pandemic is the difference in the reactions to the pandemic by the city of St. Louis and Philadelphia. St. Louis embraced a number of the measures suggested to contain the virus and escaped a truly horrific outcome whereas Philadelphia ignored the warnings of public health officials and paid the price in the lives of the citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. So what we are being asked to do today in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic may be inconvenient to us, but it is the best remedy against a disease to which we have little defense. The strain of influenza of 1918 to 1920 has been identified as a form of avian influenza, H1N1, very similar to the strain that struck the world in 2009.

Though not speculative fiction, Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter is a tale set during this dark era of modern human history. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, on the other hand, is about the survivors of a pandemic flu (in the novel it is called the Georgian flu) that makes the Spanish flu look like a mild cold; it decimates humanity by 99 percent.

The 2009 strain of influenza was a reassortment of bird and human influenza viruses combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus. Around 700 million to 1.4 billion people were believed to have been infected by the virus with, fortunately a relatively lower death toll than the 1918 variety, but still significant. Around 150,000 to 575,000 people worldwide died due to the 2009 pandemic, not much different than the seasonal flu mortality rate. Interestingly enough, though this strain of the H1N1 virus was not nearly as deadly as its 1918 relative, like its earlier version, it did not affect older adults as severely as it did younger people.

The Spanish Flu certainly was the most severe pandemic but it was not the first in modern times. In the late 19^th century, a pandemic known as both Asiatic flu or Russian flu killed one million world-wide. It was first reported in Russia in May 1889 and had stretched throughout the northern hemisphere of the Russian Empire in just four months, reaching the United States in January 1890. The likely culprit here was likely H3N8 an influenza A virus normally found in birds, horses, dogs, cats and seals.

The 1918 flu also was not the only influenza pandemic of the 20^th century either. There was one in 1957 to 1958, called the Asian Flu. This strain of influenza, unlike the H1N1, twas an H2N2 type, a combination of avian and human influenza. The first cases appeared in late 1956 in Guizhou Province of China before entering the neighboring province of Yunnan by the end of February 1957. By June it had reached India, Great Britain and United States. The disease peaked in October but the disease struck again in 1958 with a second wave in January and February hitting the elderly quite heavily. In total approximately one to two million people died worldwide; the Centers for Disease Control and Promotion estimates that the death toll was around 1.1 million. It had the potential to have as devastating an impact on the world’s population as the Spanish Flu but for the intervention of better health care, antibiotics to deal with secondary bacterial complications such as pneumonia, and most importantly the development of a vaccine.

There was another shift in the influenza virus in 1968, this time a H3N2 variety called the Hong Kong flu. By the time that the pandemic ended in 1969, approximately one million people worldwide perished. It began in Hong Kong in the middle July of 1968, hence its namesake, before impacting neighboring Vietnam and Singapore by the end of July. By September it had reached India, the Philippines, Australia and Europe. Returning American troops from Vietnam brought the flu with them and outbreaks that began in California soon spread to the entire United States by December. With better medical care only around one million people worldwide perished from this pandemic; the toll could have been much higher.

There was another pandemic, often unnoticed except to its victims, due to its slow movement across populations and more importantly indifference by governments, that was first clinically reported on June 5, 1981 with five cases in the United States. The victims showed symptoms of Pneumocystis carnii, an opportunistic organism that causes pneumonia mainly in those with highly compromised immune systems such as transplant patients. Soon there was a group of homosexual men who developed a rare skin cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created a task force to study the new disease that was causing these otherwise rare afflictions. Early on there was no name for the disease. At first it was referred to as the 4H disease as the main victims appeared to be heroin users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs and Haitians. It was dubbed GRID in the mainstream media, short for gay-related immune deficiency. By 1982, the CDC referred to the disease as AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. By 1983, two independent research groups identified the cause of the syndrome, a novel retrovirus.

There are now known to be two such retroviruses known as HIV-1 and HIV-2 that can lead to AIDS. Likely the viruses originated in non-human primates in West Africa, such as green monkeys, sooty mangabeys and chimpanzees. There is a virus known as SIV, simian immunodeficiency virus, that infects non-human primates. How the virus started to infect humans is likely from the practise of eating bushmeat. Humans who hunt or prepare raw wild primates, among other animals, for consumption are often exposed to the SIV which, in humans, may cause illness, but it is self-limited and mild and people recover. Such transmissions over time, though, could have resulted in the evolution of the more deadly form of the virus, HIV. It is estimated that HIV has claimed over 38 million lives since its initial discovery. Science fiction writer, Norman Spinrad, was scathing in his critique of the world’s initial response to the AIDS pandemic in his Journal of the Plague Years, using a constantly mutating virus instead to demonstrate the slow and disenfranchised conservative response.

One could argue that the Age of Exploration (15^th to 17^th Century) was the source of pandemics that impacted native populations of the New World, Australia and many isolated islands across the globe. In the 1520’s following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico, over 150,000 perished from smallpox in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire and now the site of modern day Mexico City. In the 1530’s, the conquistadors had carried their disease to Peru which resulted in an easy rout of the mighty Incan Empire. Smallpox was but one disease that the conquerors brought with them. In the 17^th century, it was measles, an airborne virus, that killed over two million Mexican natives. Smallpox outbreaks also impacted the indigenous populations of Massachusetts from 1618 to 1619. The Plains Indians also suffered with outbreaks of smallpox over the years. Overall, it has been estimated that diseases to which Europeans had immunities after years of exposure in Europe, decimated the indigenous population by around 95 percent, a figure that is difficult to comprehend even when compared to the devastation caused by Black Death in Middle Ages Europe.

Australian and New Zealand natives too suffered with smallpox brought by European explorers that killed around fifty percent of the population. Other island nations were impacted by the diseases carried by the European traders and explorers. Measles, pertussis and influenza killed around forty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand Hawaiians between 1848 to 1849. Smallpox decimated the population of Easter Island, an isolated Pacific island off the coast of South America, and measles killed around forty thousand Fijians.

Cholera is something that people think of as being associated with tropical and subtropical regions of the globe, but in total, cholera has caused seven pandemics in the past 200 years and have affected different areas of the globe at different times; no area was spared during this spate of pandemics.

Each of the pandemics reached different areas of the globe moving along trade routes and movements of soldiers from the country of origin, India. It is an infection of the small intestine caused by some strains of Vibrio cholerae. The zoonotic bacterium is found naturally in brackish and saltwater attaching itself to the shells of shellfish; in addition to drinking contaminated water, another method of transmission to humans is consuming undercooked or raw shellfish from contaminated water supplies. Symptoms can range from asymptomatic to severe. The classic symptom is large amounts of watery diarrhea over a period of a few days. Severe dehydration is often the result which can lead to death in many cases. Still today it afflicts up to five million people per year and kills up to 130,000. Prevention is a safe water supply.

In 1854, a cholera outbreak in Soho District of London was traced by an English physician, John Snow (1813-1858). Without knowing the cause of the outbreak, he was able to conclude through the investigation of cases, the origin of the disease was a handpump that drew water from a well. By removing the handle from the pump, the outbreak ended. Interestingly enough, this was the beginning of the science of epidemiology. Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the variables of diseases in defined populations. It is the cornerstone of public health allowing a comprehensive analysis of disease patterns which in turn, can provide clues to preventing further spread or suffering of a population.

Albert Camus’ The Plague, means something different to almost anyone who reads it. It contends with two horrors, one is the pollical system of fascism, which, in 1947, when the novel was published, the world was just escaping, as well as the horror of something far more natural, the cholera epidemic that struck Algeria in 1849.

A truly horrific disease that has the potential of causing a pandemic in the form of a viral hemorrhagic fever is Ebola Virus and its relatives. It affects humans and other primates. Its symptoms can start in as little as two days up to three weeks after exposure. It begins with typical flu-like symptoms before some severe enteric symptoms begin eventually leading to a massive bleeding both internally and externally. It has a death rate of up to ninety percent but with an average of fifty percent. It first caught the attention of the world in 1976 during two outbreaks, one in Sudan and the other in the Congo. Pockets of the disease have arisen throughout sub-Saharan Africa since that time but it was an outbreak in West Africa that lasted from December 2013 to January 2016 that resulted in over twenty-eight thousand cases and over eleven thousand deaths that a world health emergency was declared by the World Health Organization. With the West African outbreak the world narrowly escaped a disaster. A combination of the lethality of the virus which limited transmissions and the quick action of the World Health Organization and other agencies to contain the virus spared us.

To give us an idea of how close we could come to a pandemic of one of these horrific ebola-like diseases, we can look at what happened in Washington DC in 1989. At the Hazelton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia, a group of macaques at the laboratory began to experience an Ebola-like symptoms. The monkeys had come from the Philippines. While investigating an outbreak of simian hemorrhagic fever amongst the monkeys in November of 1989, a microscopist found what appeared to be a virus very similar to the structure of the deadly Ebola virus. Where did the disease come from? Could the monkeys have come in with the disease? Over a third of the monkeys died in three months. The rest were euthanized to contain the illness but unfortunately by then six of the handlers seroconverted, meaning that they were exposed to the simian disease. It also appeared that the disease could be spreading through the air. The six handlers however did not become ill with Ebola so the virus was deemed to be a strain of the Ebola organism that fortunately does not affect humans. At the time we did not know that, though. The newly discovered virus was dubbed the Reston virus which belongs in the genus Ebolavirus, the same as its more deadly cousin. If it had been Ebola that had struck in Africa as was originally suspected, the result could have been catastrophic. Washington escaped a potential disaster.

Ebola and its relatives are normally transmitted to others via direct contact with bodily fluids such as saliva, vomit, feces, sweat, breast milk, urine and semen. Dead bodies remain infectious and due to some body preparation practises, that puts people at risk. One scary thought is that it can also be transmitted through the air, as was suspected of the Reston virus, not demonstrated in people but found under strict laboratory conditions, but not from primate to primate but actually pigs to primates.

Though not confirmed, the Ebola virus is believed to have started in bats but plants, arthropods and rodents have all been considered. Through the eating of wild game including bats there is the possibility that it made the leap into humans. Other animals that have been found to be infected with the virus are chimpanzees, baboons and gorillas.

The current situation in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic which began in late 2019 in Wuhan China warrants concern because we have never successfully created a vaccine against coronaviruses. Currently there is no antiviral treatment for this potentially deadly disease. Symptoms of COVID- 19 include fever, cough and shortness of breath though many suffer relatively mild cold-like symptoms or possibly no symptoms at all.

By the end of January 2020, the outbreak was recognized as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. Since the announcement by China on December 31, 2019 about an outbreak in Wuhan, it has spread to every country across the globe with the exception of Antarctica. Nobody has escaped it. It has resulted in unprecedented responses first from the authoritarian governments where the disease first took hold through severe travel restrictions, facility closures, quarantines, curfews and the maintenance of physical distance. Now even democratic countries have imposed similar measures. In a sense, the world appears to be in stasis economically until such time as the limitations on our liberties are lifted. There are no vaccines or antiviral drugs, COVID-19 aside, to prevent or cure any known type of coronavirus, probably the reason why many of us get a cold every year.

There are coronaviruses that infect many different species of mammals andbirds, mainly affecting the respiratory system. They are enveloped RNA viruses with characteristic club-shaped spikes projecting from their surface hence the name, since under an electron micrograph, it appears a lot like the solar corona. Models have demonstrated that the first coronavirus evolved around eight thousand years ago though there are also models that show a start around 55 million years ago. Time of origin aside, it is likely that the coronavirus had its origin in bats and possibly birds. Most human coronaviruses had their origin in bats that over time have spilled over and adapted to human populations.

Today’s pandemic is not the first time that a coronavirus has impacted the world beyond the common cold. From 2002 to 2004, there was the potential for a global pandemic that first took hold in Guangdong, China in November of 2002. By the end of May of 2004, after which no further cases were reported, the disease had infected over eight thousand people from 29 different countries; 774 people died. That disease was dubbed SARS, an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus’ origin has been traced originally to horseshoe bats which made the leap to civet cats and eventually to humans. In the Yunnan Province in China. Though many countries were involved, a well-coordinated world and relatively quick response led by the World Health Organization spared the world a potential pandemic. We were also aided by the fact that the disease is not transmitted from person to person as easily as the virus’ relatives, the common cold and of course, COVID-19.

Dean Koontz has been honored by conspiracy theorists regarding the current novel coronavirus pandemic. In 1981 he published Eyes of Darkness, in which he describes a bioweapon, a virus called Wuhan-400 that was developed in the city of Wuhan, the site of COVID-19’s origin. Unlike COVID-19 which has been detected in domestic cats, dogs and a zoo tiger though the symptoms were mild and the animals recovered, Wuhan-400 in Koontz's story only afflicts humans and can survive only one minute outside the confines of a human body.

Laurence Wright, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, wrote the thriller, The End of October, about a pandemic that originates in Asia. Interestingly enough, the subtext of the novel is cautionary. Government intelligence, security and oversight today has been focused on the wrong threat, terrorism, and not the ones that truly do the damage such as climate change and of course, the current pandemic.

In spite of similarities, her book Songs for the End of the World by Canadian writer Saleema Nawaz could be described as a zeitgeist of our times. It was written over the span of seven years so it is not a case of cashing in on the crisis of today─its publishing date is more suspect since its original release was due in August of this year. Believe it or not, its plot is about a coronavirus pandemic that strikes United States, guess when, 2020.

China is not the only source of the coronaviruses that have the potential to becoming a pandemic. One first appeared in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and most cases were isolated there, but it did make an impact other countries, especially in South Korea. It became known as MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome. By the middle of 2015, when the outbreak abated, it had reached 24 countries with over a thousand cases of the virus with a very high death rate; over 400 people died in the outbreak. The virus that causes MERS originated in bats which was somehow transmitted to camels─the mechanism of exposure between the species is unknown─but it was the camels that were likely the intermediary between the bat reservoir of the virus and humans.

Even when the current COVID-19 pandemic comes to a halt, the threat of contagious diseases will not disappear in spite of advancements of science and information technology. Human-made changes in the world will continue to provide opportunities for novel microbes to terrorize the human population.

One threat of a future pandemic is very much a human-made threat. It is antibiotic resistance of bacteria. Since the discovery of antibiotics by Alexander Fleming in 1928, who coincidentally warned against their overuse, overuse over the years has resulted in today’s superbugs such as Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci (VRE) that caused havoc in hospitals and long-term care homes for years. There are also increasingly resistant tuberculosis bacteria in the environment waiting to find a host; every year they do, infecting approximately fifty million people annually, mainly in China and India but other countries of the world are not spared either. Now there are still procedures and treatments in place to deal with these diseases, but we are not out of the woods yet. Continued use of antibiotics unnecessarily, not finishing your prescription of antibiotics and the use of antibiotics to fatten our farm animals are continuing to promote the continued evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria; one day we will hit a brick wall and bacterial infections could become a death sentence. Bitter Paradise by Ross Pennie describes a Hamilton, Ontario site where children are dropping because of vaccine-resistant strain of polio. Polio was very common before the mid 1950s after which there was widespread use of a poliovirus vaccine and the disease began to wane especially in the developed nations of the world. The World Health Organization has made it a mission to eradicate the disease, similar to smallpox, back in 1988, but there are still stubborn pockets of the disease that continue to arise in areas such as Pakistan and Afghanistan as recently as 2015.

Another pandemic of possibility is due to bioterrorism run amok. If a rogue nation or a developed one for that matter develops a disease for which there is no cure or vaccine, the world will be at its mercy should it escape the confines of the laboratory. There are some conspiracy theorists who believe that the current pandemic COVID-19 was made in a research laboratory studying coronaviruses, which happens to exist in the area of Wuhan, China. Then there is another theory that it arose due to work by the American military. Neither is likely but we cannot dismiss the idea that it might not happen in the future.

Recently in one of the Situation Reports of the World Health Organization it was concluded that the novel coronavirus was indeed zoonotic in origin, likely originally, like other coronaviruses, from bats, not created in a laboratory. COVID-19 likely, like its relative SARS, probably started in the wet markets of China. The combination of exotic wild and domestic animals kept in unsanitary and stressful conditions and the proximity of people over extended periods of time likely transformed a bat coronavirus into the pandemic of today.

As early as the sixth century BC, humankind used disease to gain advantage over others. Assyrians contaminated water supplies of enemies with toxic fungi. The Mongols that conquered much of Eurasia through various ways of warfare that included the throwing of diseased animal carcasses over the walls of fortified cities only to let the disease the animals carried to do the work for them. The British in their conquest of the Americas traded smallpox contaminated blankets to the First Nation tribes that they conquered in the 1700’s. The Germans in the First World War experimented with glanders, a livestock disease to be used in their fight against the other world powers. The Japanese of the Second World War had an extensive bioweapons program as well.

Due to their dangerous potential, bioweapon production was banned to supplement the Geneva Protocol in 1975. The Biological Weapons Convention banned the production, storage, stockpiling and transportation of bioweapons. The United States and United Kingdom openly destroyed their stockpiles, and 170 countries signed the treaty, including the Soviet Union. In spite of assurances, some nations are still feared to have active programs including some of those that signed.

Not strictly confined to the literary world of speculative fiction, the concept of biological terrorism has a place in the genre of literary thrillers. Many of the best-selling authors of thriller fiction have at least one or two novels that contain components of bioterrorism. Michael Palmer’s A Heartbeat Away, Vector by Robin Cook, The Judas Strain by James Rollins, Brad Thor’s Blowback, Clive Cussler’s The Plague Ship and Black Wind, Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders and Rainbow Six, Robert Ludlum’s The Moscow Vector, W.E.B. Griffiths’ The Outlaws, Raymond Khoury’s The Sanctuary, Nelson DeMille’s Plum Island and Ken Follett’s Whiteout are just a few of the many thrillers by best selling writers that deal with the topic of bioterrorism. Code Orange by Caroline Cooney is particularly interesting; it is about a student who finds a smallpox scab in an envelope of an old medical text, and inadvertently alerts terrorists when he searches the internet about the disease.

Other authors wrote of manufactured diseases not used in warfare but as result of science gone amok. David Palmer’s Emergence tells the story of how a human-developed plague destroys half of the world’s population. It won the Compton Literary Award in 1985. The Quick and the Dead, by Matthew John Lee, describes the aftermath of an attack on the British Isles using an enhanced smallpox virus. Margaret Atwood in her book, Oryx and Crake, part one of the Madaddam trilogy, follows the main character who suffers from amnesia. We never are told explicitly but it is quite possible that the character is the last person on Earth. He remembers his past in a series of flashbacks that point to the fact that he and his science colleague, were responsible for the apocalypse because of uncontrolled genetic experimentation. Stephen King’s epic tome, The Stand, follows a group of survivors of a government plague that escapes containment.

Other authors have looked at other types of plagues that may afflict humans other than those caused by microbes. Kurt Vonnegut is a writer known for his interesting satirical stories and his novel, Slapstick, is no exception. In the novel, China has attained the ability to shrink its global footprint by shrinking its citizens, literally. Soon the resource-saving maneuver has gone too far and the shrunken population is then inhaled by normal-sized humans, thus resulting in a plague in the western world. Jeff Carlson wrote, The Plague Year, describes a futuristic pandemic not caused by microbes but by nanotechnology. A nanomachine plague kills all mammals that it comes into contact with, but it has one weakness, that it cannot survive at extreme altitudes so that survivors are able to survive above ten thousand feet. One interesting pandemic, Herod’s Flu, is found in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. It is treated as a public health crisis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, causing both flu-like symptoms and miscarried pregnancies. Interestingly enough the virus is actually a part of the “junk” DNA in the human genome. In the novel, it is actually the cause of rapid speciation, accelerating the normally slow rate of evolution.

This “junk” DNA is actually made up of traces of viruses that have become embedded in the human genome, first integrated millions of years ago. They are now known as human endogenous retroviruses (HERV). All vertebrates have their own version of such viral elements in their genome. In humans, they make up between five and eight percent of our genome. They became a part of who we are by doing what viruses do best, insert into a human cell to reproduce. Most often they invade the somatic cells (regular body cells) but at times they will invade the sperm or egg cells allowing their genetic material to become a part of another organism. The organism will then carry this retroviral genome as part of its own. More is being found out about this once believed benign material, perhaps playing a role in diseases such as multiple sclerosis. They are known to also have a role in shaping of our genomes by playing a role in gene shuffling and variation which is essential enhancing human and other vertebrate evolution.

Some authors have written about the aftermath of a mysterious illness that sweeps the globe. Mary Shelley, of Frankenstein fame, wrote the lesser known The Last Man, published in 1826. It is a narrative of the last man on Earth living in the time after a plague that destroys the human race. Like her other writings, she incorporates science into her novel. It is a novel of warning about a world in which medicine became too complacent in its ways, thus allowing the killer disease to take hold, very apropos perhaps to the world we find ourselves in today. Earth Abides, by George Stewart is a tale of the aftermath of an unknown illness that kills off a majority of the population of the United States in which the hero ventures out to see what else is out there in the aftermath of the disease. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London describes a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by a fictional disease, The Red Death. Portuguese novelist, Jose Saramago, wrote the novel, simply named Blindness. The story follows the lives of a blind doctor and his wife. The doctor is mysteriously able to see in the aftermath of a disease outbreak that leaves people totally blind. The authorities, in an effort to contain the illness, house the victims in forced quarantine to contain the outbreak.

Other authors have looked at truly unique illnesses that focus more on the symptomology of the illness. In Beauty Salon, by Mario Bellatin, a pandemic almost exterminates men only; death is rapid due to government inaction. The novel setting, a beauty salon becomes a hospice for the dying. White Plague by Frank Herbert is totally the opposite in describing a plague that only kills women. In The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, the plague afflicting people is not something that one would expect of disease symptoms, but it starts with a dissolution of one’s shadow, which evolves to a termination of memories over time perhaps a metaphor for the current epidemic of Alzheimer’s Disease in many developed nations. Also along the same lines is Find Me by Laura van den Berg, which describes an epidemic that erases memories. As horrific as the disease is, it is the search for the cure that is even more horrendous.

We are walking a tightrope. If we continue to exploit the planet and invade or alter ecosystems we expose ourselves to new microbes. We must prepare ourselves today to avoid the possibilities outlined in science fiction. They serve as a warning of what might be. Governments, corporations and people must heed the lessons. Public health regulations are not in place to create an inconvenience for citizens and business owners. Anti-vaxxers, people who claim it is their right to avoid vaccinations due to personal and religious reasons, for example, think that the remedy of vaccination is more severe than the disease. The horrors of smallpox have been eradicated by a successful vaccination program. Outbreaks of diptheria, polio, measles, mumps, pertussis, rubella, influenza were once common across the world and only with the implementation of mass vaccination programs have we kept these diseases at bay. However, they are making a comeback though due to fewer and fewer people seeing the need and claiming their rights to not vaccinate. Public health regulations such as regulating drinking water and recreational water, food production, personal services settings such as tattoo shops and nail salons are there to make your business and personal life better, more effective and to avoid a human toll of morbidity and mortality. Today we are physically distancing, cancelling mass gatherings and closing down all but essential services again not to inconvenience but to save lives. COVID-19 should serve as a warning. We cannot afford to go back. Our economy and our way of life is being brought to the brink. We will get through it but only we can avoid another huge hit on the world.

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